So this is happening on the other side of the Atlantic, but I want to blog it anyway. Not because it will mean much or do much, but just because I feel this is important and…well basically I just want to show my support for a voice that should be heard.
Renegade Evolution has been invited to speak at at a debate forum on sex work and pornography at William and Mary College. On her side will also be sex workers’ rights advocate Jill Brenneman of SWOP East. And on the other side there is male “feminist” John Foubert, and anti-sex work activist Sam Berg (”crusader” would probably be a more apt word - I hadn’t heard of the woman before, but after just a bit of reading she seems unhinged. And for someone calling herself a feminist, she certainly displays a lot of hatred of women).
However, now it seems as if the “feminist” and “defender of women” Sam Berg are trying to get Ren uninvited since she is not “comfortable” with Ren being there. Context can be found in Ren’s post. It’s quite a bit lot of context and a lot of old stuff, but that doesn’t really matter here, what is important is this (Ren’s words):
All I want at this point is a chance to speak my side, in a forum. I want the chance to FINALLY get to be a sex worker/porn whore who gets to speak for herself, rather than having anyone and everyone do it for me, or over me, or around me.
Other people have written well about this (see below), and since I am what I am - an insignificant blogger from across the pond, not involved in any blogwars, not identified with any sides, not widely read or know, just little me - I will say this: It isn’t feminism if you aren’t prepared to hear the voices of all women. It isn’t feminism if your only concern is white, middle class, cisgendered, straight and ablebodied women who has the luxury to be involved in abstract academic debates. It isn’t feminism if you, by actions, inaction or words, display hate for certain women and treat them as either poor misguided victims in need for your rescue, or evil patriarchy enablers, young, dumb and full of cum. It isn’t feminism if you, in your quest for that Feminist Utopia, trample on the lives and souls of living breathing women.
So, I’m just showing my support here, insignificant as it may be. Other people have written also, and they have good things to say: Natalia Antonova, Burning Words, Astarte’s Circus, Uncool .
(I’m sure there are more, but no time for reading right now)
The debate article I wrote about the other day has gotten a reply from Göran Lantz, professor in health care ethics. It’s well formulated and well reasoned. Anders Svensson has been given the opportunity to reply directly. This time he manages without references to military dictatorships like Burma and North Korea (even though North Korea can’t really be called a military dictatorship, it’s more a personality cult taken to the utmost extreme, but Svensson is a lawyer, not a political scientist, so he’ll get a pass for that one). But he still invokes the image of a country where people are hindered to say and think what they want, and where conversations fall silent in fear of repression:
I was gladly surprised by the positive tone which go through much of Göran Lantz’s contribution. he says, though, that those who want it have freedom of speech. That is actually not the case any longer in Sweden.
Freedom of speech is not that which is marked by the new ground of values of political correctness. On the contrary, freedom of speech is being subjected to serious attacks.
I often think about a headline which struck me already years ago. It says: “When conversation fall silent”. This has already begun in Sweden.
There is only one thing to say about that:
Seriously though, it would be becoming to Svensson and his ilk if they for once would produce any clear examples on how this silencing works and how freedom of speech is being infringed. Also, I am very interested to learn, in clear reasoning, how same sex marriage would affect freedom of speech negatively. Svensson has been allowed two articles in a big and highly regarded newspaper now. Countries in which freedom of speech is truly repressed (like Burma and North Korea) don’t usually let people complain about how they are being repressed. I would like Anders Svensson to talk to some Burmese and North Korean refugees about how Sweden is just as bad as their countries when it comes to freedom of speech. I think they could give him a useful lesson on the subject of what true repression looks like.
Dutch politician Geert Wilders has released his anti-Islam film “Fitna”. It was quite comical today when editorial writer Per Gudmundsson (Svenska Dagbladet) on page 4 in the paper questions whether the movie really exists and complains how it has been stopped by politicians, the media and companies like Google, and then in the same paper, on page 21, there is an article about how the movie is available on the internet. And it’s very Google-able. Per Gudmundsson has noted his mistake.
From what I have read about the movie (I’m sorry, but I’m not going to watch it. Scold me all you want for it, but I’m not) it doesn’t really seem like an insightful work of art. Selected quotes from the Quran blended with pictures of the terrorist attacks on New York, London and Madrid, of executions and stonings and other such terrifying things. More pictures of the Quran, and then in the end the sound of a page being ripped out, said to be a page from a phone book, and then a call to the Muslims themselves to rip the “evil pages” out of the Quran.
Some commenters I have read are of course hailing Wilders’ film as a very important wake up call to us in the west. How? What does the movie accomplish? To me, it seems to add nothing new - any one can pick up a Quran at a book store (albeit translated unless you read Arabic) and the movie clips are of the same kind readily available on the internet, and in many cases, on our TV screens during the evening news. An internet documentary, of which there are twenty a dozen. A tired provocation.
It seems as if the right wing populist parties and the extremist islamists are living in some kind of symbiosis - they can’t exist without each other. For the extremist islamists, the movie is yet another reason to preach their hate, and for the anti-Islam populists, the protests become yet another reason to preach their hate and make yet another movie or caricature. And on and on it goes. Sigh.
What I want to know is - if the anti-Islam crowd are so hell-bent on defending our freedom and our way of life against the said onslaught of scary scary Muslims, what is their proposed solution to the “Islam problem”? Because all of the solutions which comes to my mind run quite contrary to that beloved freedom and democracy they so want to defend. So, what do they propose? Deporting all Muslims? Converting them to another religion by force? Forbid all expressions of Islam (however that one will work)? Invade all Muslim countries, kill their leaders and forcibly convert the population to Christianity (the Ann Coulter solution)? Make being a Muslim a punishable crime (and what should be the punishment? re-education? death? prison?)? Round up all Muslims and put them in special camps? What is the idea?
I haven’t heard anyone in the right wing populist anti-Islam crowd actually propose a solution to the perceived problem. It’s like when pro-choicers ask the pro-life crowd what the punishment for having an abortion should be. The answer is — crickets. Or some mumbling about “but that’s not what I meant”. It’s easy to rail and chant and make movies and provoke, but when they are called on the consequences of their ideas, they are mostly speechless.
PS. nowhere in this post have I questioned the right of Geert Wilders to make the movie and to show it. He has every right to do that, no matter how stupid it is. That is not the point.
(I promise, the headline will make sense if you read on!)
Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet publishes a tired old same-sex-marriage-will-destroy-society tirade in their debate section today. It’s written by Anders Svensson, who says he’s a lawyer and law teacher at Stockholm University. I pity his students (and hope they take him on tomorrow):
Imagine a country were the legislators re-interpret human rights according to a value-neutral ideology, where dissidents are violated and where media censors unfit opinions. The military dictatorship of Burma or North Korea? No, it’s the country of Sweden.
Dear Anders Svensson: If you write a long opinions piece about a contentious issue and then get it published in a really large newspaper, where debate ensues and people are allowed to have different opinions and counterarguments are raised and you get support from some and critique from some, and all this happens without the police knocking on your door or you losing your job or getting imprisoned or tortured or threatened - that’s usually a sign that you’re not living in a military dictatorship.
His main argument against same sex marriage is not “won’t somebody please think of the children!” or “horses and box turtles and forty wives oh my!” but this:
It is not hard to see how a gender neutral marriage law would be yet another weapon of censorship against traditional values.
Oh really? What would be censored? How would this censoring work? Would legions of newlywed same sex couples invade newsrooms, lecture halls and kitchen tables everywhere to make sure everyone follows the “homosexual agenda”? Svensson, of course, doesn’t tell. But he sure is censored and oppressed, the poor little sod, sitting there at Stockholm University and getting his writing published in a large private newspaper. Yes, you can really feel the Swedish military dictatorship at work here.
But if the GLBT folks are so powerful that they can impose a brutal military regime à la North Korea on us unsuspecting Swedish citizens (they’ve done a great job of masquerading it as a pretty decent democracy, I can tell you), you would wonder why they haven’t managed to get that gender neutral marriage law passed in the parliament yet. Maybe they forgot to squeeze it in between brunch and facials.
A good society must rest on stable ground of values which are reflected in legislation. What does this ground of values look like? Well, it can’t lack values. In Sweden, we have abolished this ground of values and are traveling down a road of lack of norms. How can the legislature accept this?
If people aren’t allowed to think and speak freely, a democratically stable ground of values are missing. We don’t need any more laws which despite good intentions create a fearful society where conversations die out. I want to warn the Swedish parliament of taking further steps down this road of silence and censorship. The parliament should say no thanks to this sophisticated form of euthanasia for marriage.
As often with these kinds of articles, there’s no substance. No explanations, no examples, no logical arguments, not any arguments at all about why a “good society” can’t coexist with same sex marriage, why same sex marriage hinders people from thinking and speaking freely, which values will be destroyed and how and why conversations will be silenced. No explanation on how man-woman marriages will be “euthanized” if man-man or woman-woman marriages are allowed. No line of reasoning to follow. Just fluff and a lot of words.
Also, note this lovely allegory, used to rail against anti-discrimination laws and policies. As a metaphor for gay people, he uses a weed.
A dandelion isn’t discriminated against because it can’t call itself a tulip.
So, uppity gay-dandelion-weeds should be satisfied with the civil unions they have today (which people like Anders Svensson raised all kind of hell against when they were introduced in the 90s because they would destroy society, but which they now present as a great “separate but equal”-solution) and not destroy the lovely garden of heterosexual tulip-marriages. Dandelions can also silence conversations and turn countries into North Korea. Or something.
Tor of Antigayretorik takes on the train-wreck article here, tireless and to the point as always.
The situation in Burma is not getting any better, but the eyes of the world is no longer on the country. Reporters Without Borders report that the internet is still closely monitored and that the connections are deteriorating:
/…/ in a move to step up control of Internet cafés, owners have been required since January to keep the records of their clients’ online activity and deliver them each week to a special police unit at the department of information. At the same time, according to Irrawady, a publication produced by Burmese exiles in Thailand, “the Burmese regime’s network of informers are now focusing their attention on Internet cafés, which are replacing traditional teashops as places where people can discreetly share their views with others.”
Women’s eNews has a feature up about Shah Paung, one of the Irrawaddy’s reporters. She gets her stories smuggled out from Burma by a network of secret informants communicating largely via mobile phones. Shah Paung comes from the Karen people, which face heavy persecution in Burma. Systematic rapes is one of the weapons used by the military government against Karen women.
Press freedom and freedom of expression are nonexistent in Burma. According to Reporters Without Borders, internet café owner and blogger Nay Phone Latt has been detained for a month now, apparently for owning a video of a traditional Burmese play called “A-Nyeint” performed by the theatre company “Thu-Lay-Thi.” Its performances are currently banned in Burma. And the editor and the office manager of the weekly Myanmar Nation, Thet Zin and U Sein Win Maung, has been charged for the possession of documents relating to human rights in Burma.
The Burmese military government recently announced that it will hold a referendum on a new draft constitution in May. The opposition and the exile democratic movement are critical of the process. And they have reason to be: according to the referendum law, decree 5/96, any person who make speeches, issue statements or posters in opposition to the referendum face penalties of up to three years in prison and a fine of 100 000 kyat (about 77 USD). This Irrawaddy cartoon tells much about the “choice” that the Burmese people will have in May.
One of the things that truly makes my blood boil, is when people say:
“I think [x], but you are not allowed to say that in Sweden.”
x usually = “gays are unnatural and shouldn’t be allowed to marry/have children/show affection in public”
or
“muslims shouldn’t be allowed to build mosques in Sweden, we are a Christian country”
or
“we have too many immigrants here, we can’t save the whole world”
or
“a woman’s place is a as a nurturer and caregiver to children, equality has gone too far”
or
…well, you get the idea.
First of all, you just said it, that thing that you are “not allowed to say”. And you have newspapers, and churches, and organizations, and marches, and websites, and political parties, and TV-channels, and letters to the editor that say exactly that, that thing that you are “not allowed to say”.
(I could provide links for all of those, but I refuse to give them any traffic. And I don’t want to ruin a perfectly nice Friday evening by having to look at their vile and hateful stuff. But if you’re curious, there’s www.info14.com, www.nd.se, www.varldenidag.se, www.patriot.nu, www.livetsord.se, www.bibeltemplet.net, www…. and so on.)
So don’t tell me you’re “not allowed” to believe what you believe. Don’t tell me you’re some kind of martyr in the struggle against “political correctness”. Don’t tell me you’re oppressed.
Arguing against you is not stifling your freedom of speech. Saying that you are wrong is not stifling your freedom of speech.
Neither is pointing out your misinformation, your logical fallacies, your straw-men arguments, and your blatant lies.
Freedom of speech does not mean that you can speak uncontradicted and unchallenged.
PS. That goes for the comments section here as well (if there ever will be any). DS.
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